The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University

News

New Show Features Jazz and Politics on Album Covers

News from The Center of Jazz Studies
Jazz.Covers.Politics: Art Exhibit at Nathan Cummings Foundation
April, 2013

Jazz.Covers.Politics - Album Art in an Age of Activism will be on view from April 11 to August 23, 2013 at The Nathan Cummings Foundation.

From Louis Armstrong's “(What did I do to be so) Black and Blue” and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” to John Coltrane's "Africa/Brass," this music, with its emphasis on individual freedom and improvisation, is deeply political. The exhibition Jazz.Covers.Politics presents original album covers along with beautiful reproductions, surveying the history of jazz music as part of an ongoing struggle for justice in the United States and beyond.

Curated by C. Daniel Dawson, Diedra Harris-Kelley and Robert G. O’Meally.

Viewing Hours are by appointment, Monday through Friday. Please email exhibits@nathancummings.org
The Foundation is located at 475 10th Avenue, 14th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

This exhibition was organized by the Romare Bearden Foundation.

 

 

 

Professor Kevin Fellezs wins International Association for the Study of Popular Music's Woody Guthrie Book Award

News from The Center of Jazz Studies
Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion, is this year's Co-Winner of Woody Guthrie Book Award
February, 2013
Kevin Fellezs, Assistant Professor of Music & of the Institute for Research in African American Studies

 "Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion, was considered the most accomplished monograph of the contenders. It is an engaging, well researched and argued interdisciplinary study of a long vilified musical movement. [This] book is a crucial contribution to jazz studies and rock studies, but most importantly it de-stablilizes the concept of genre itself." 

    - International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US Branch

New Blog Launched: Jazz Information Retrieval

News from The Center of Jazz Studies
Exploring Jazz through Music Information Retrieval Techniques
From: 
Columbia University
Author: 
Center for Jazz Studies
November, 2012
Jazz Information Retrieval Blog

Jazz Information Retrieval is the development blog for the J-I-R project, the music information retrieval (MIR) part of the larger J-DISC initiative.

J-DISC is a collaborative, open access online discography. It aims to add a diverse range of data on important recordings into a single repository for the sake of research in jazz studies. Since its mission is to provide ready access to discographic information, we have turned to MIR techniques to address the proliferation of such information and corresponding media on the Internet.

Music Information Retrieval refers to a collection of techniques and applications, including those of signal processing and machine learning, in which computers are used to help organize and access digital music archives. A new phase of the J-DISC project will be to research the applications of and feasibility of MIR to jazz and jazz discography in conjunction with the Computer Music Center and LabROSA.

The JIR Team will post news and experiments on out blog as we investigate the application of MIR techniques to the special challenges posed by jazz.

 

Jazz Information Retrieval
 

CU Scholars Discover Unknown Harlem Renaissance Novel

Feature Article
New work by author Claude McKay
From: 
The New York Times
Author: 
Felicia Lee
September, 2012
Claude McKay

J.C. Cloutier, a graduate student and dissertation advisee of Prof. Brent Edwards, who is a member of the Center for Jazz Studies faculty, discovered a previously unknown novel by Claude McKay, a Jamaican-born writer who was influential in the Harlem Renaissance literary movement. The The manuscript is entitled “Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem.”

Mr. Cloutier was working as an intern in Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia. H found Mr. McKay’s manuscript when examining the work of another author named Samuel Roth, who happened to be familiar with McKay personally. The roughly 300-page double-spaced manuscript, was bound between cardboardlike covers bearing the novel’s title and McKay’s name. Mr. Cloutier and Mr. Edwards gathered additional evidence by researching a number of other sources around the country to collect a wealth of additional evidence pointing to McKay’s authorship.

To read the New York Times article on this discovery, click here.

2012 Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival Showcases Historic Music Scene

Feature Article
From: 
The Columbia Newsletter
Author: 
Nick Obourn
September, 2012
From left: Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill

As it grew from a local sound to a worldwide movement, the jazz scene in Harlem was home to legendary music figures whose influence continues to haunt and ignite the local community. From May 7-13, these sounds of jazz will fill Harlem’s historic music venues for the second annual Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival.

This year’s festival—presented by The Apollo Theater, Harlem Stage, Jazzmobile and Columbia University—features concerts, panel talks, education programs, and film screenings, with icons such as Wycliffe Gordon, Savion Glover, Stanley Crouch, and Amiri Baraka.

“It is a great honor for Columbia to be a part of the Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival,” said Marcia Sells, associate dean in the office of Community Outreach, Columbia University School of the Arts and associate vice president in the office of Government and Community Affairs. “The Festival offers Columbia a chance to deepen our relationship with Harlem and collaborate with other local partners.”

Link to the Rest of the article

Beardenmania! Links and Information on New Exhibition

Feature Article
Centennial tributes honoring Romare Bearden
From: 
ARTNews
Author: 
Gail Gregg
July, 2012
Romare Bearden "Home To Ithaka"

Robert O'Meally, former Director of the Center for Jazz Studies, was interviewed in ARTnews on the work of Romare Bearden, on the Centennial this year of the influential African-American artist and his engagement with jazz. O’Meally is writing the catalogue essay and interpretive material for a large exhibition, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) show “Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey,” which began its tour at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in October. The show features a series of Bearden collages reinterpreting the Odyssey and the Iliad narratives.

Link to Artnews article

 

OTHER ARTICLES ON THIS EXHIBITION:

Art Daily

Winston-Salem Journal

 

Jimmy Heath Video Now On Jazz Studies Online

News from The Center of Jazz Studies
From: 
Center of Jazz Studies Video Resources
Author: 
Center for Jazz Studies
July, 2012

Saxophonist and composer Jimmy Heath talks with colleague Salim Washington about his new autobiography. In I Walked with Giants (Temple University Press, 2010), Heath creates a "dialogue" with musicians he has known and family members. This discussion expands on Heath's account of his life and career. He offers his thoughts on growing up in the big band era and the advent of bebop; on the experience and legacy of racial segregation; on the jazz tradition and the avant-garde; on the power of the music industry and what constitutes musical integrity and quality. In response to an audience question, Heath also professes his own source of musical inspiration: both "soul and science" together.

J-DISC: An Online Jazz Discography

News from The Center of Jazz Studies
New Discographic Website Just Launched!
From: 
jdisc.columbia.edu
Author: 
Center for Jazz Studies
July, 2012

J-DISC, a collaborative, open access online discography funded, just went live on June 30, 2012. You can now browse and search J-DISC’s rich data on jazz recordings and commentary on the issues involved by noted jazz scholars. The Center began to create a dynamic scholarly presence on the Internet in the realm of research and education with Jazz Studies Online, with generous support from the Ford Foundation, in 2008, and is moving this agenda forward with the online jazz discography now known as J-DISC, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. J-DISC is designed to make the vast existing body of available reference material about jazz recordings easier to use, and as a model resource in which scholars may edit, interpret, and share the insights they gain from that material. While data and commentary are still being added, our ultimate goal is to create an online reference work that will enable the emerging field of jazz studies to mine large amounts of data on jazz history and jazz improvisation generated in the production and dissemination of jazz recordings, and enable researchers, teachers and students to communicate effectively about how they may use the data.

Bob O'Meally: The Jazzman Testifies

Feature Article
Former CJS Director featured in Columbia community publication
From: 
Columbia College Today
Author: 
Jamie Katz
May, 2009
Robert O'Meally

Robert O'Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature, has two passions: literature and jazz. His work combines the two, and his founding of the Center for Jazz Studies carries on the work of exploring the links between jazz and American culture. This article discusses Professor O"Meally's colorful life and interests.

Link to Complete Article